


Impossible Geometry

by Wilde_Shade



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 00:42:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4856648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wilde_Shade/pseuds/Wilde_Shade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something this catastrophic was only a matter of time. In a fair world, only Ford would pay for his own mistakes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Don't mind me. This is just part of the Gravity Falls Great Tumblr-Fic Dump 2k15.
> 
> Just... passin' through. Leaving the fics accumulating on my side blog.

 

Deep down, Ford had known it would only be a matter of time. Interdimensional rifts weren’t meant to be kept in cabinets.

It was evening when it happened. Dipper had been down there with him only a moment earlier, having followed his great uncle to the basement after dinner. The boy was full of questions. Ford hated having to turn him away when he was busy.

Just now, he was glad he had.

When containment on the rift failed, so did gravity. Ford had ample time to realize what was going on as he floated toward the ceiling. Below him the rift grew. The blues and blacks swirled, the stars creating spiral lines as a tunnel formed. It would expand and then collapse. Ford had anticipated this. He’d just hoped he had it under control. If he was lucky, he had - to some extent. Maybe it wouldn’t take the universe or the town or even the house.

As Ford continued to look down, he realized that, at the very least, it was taking the basement and him with it. As a man of science, he was relieved. As a man who had only just spent thirty long years a dimension away from his own reality- “No, no, no!” He groped for the ceiling that was out of his reach. Gravity kicked back in before he could grab onto anything sturdy.

Ford fell at an angle - or, more accurately, was pulled. Anything that wasn’t bolted down dropped with him. He reached for what he could, clutching the side of a bookshelf and the leg of a chair like they might anchor him somehow. The scattered remnants of the containment field flickered. The rift fluctuated in size. It took up a little over a quarter of the lab’s floor space. It was shrinking in increments and not nearly fast enough.

A desk was the first thing Ford caught on to that didn’t give way. It had been built into one of the control panels for the original portal. Its sides were metal and difficult to keep hold of. Ford could feel static on the legs of his pants. Everything from the hair on his arms to the shirt on his back reached for the rift.

The sound of the elevator door opening nearly startled Ford into letting go entirely. His first thought was that Dipper had come back down. “Dipper?” he called, heart in his throat.

“Outside with Mabel. You’d think the whole place was coming down up there- What…” It was Stan’s voice and it trailed off. If things were bad upstairs, they were dire down in the lab. “Stanford? Stanford!”

Ford hesitated to say anything. What could he say that would wouldn’t just endanger them both? Suddenly, his hands slipped on the desk. Adrenaline forced words from him. “Stanley! Help me!” His arms were starting to ache. It was hard to tell if the pull was getting stronger or if his strength was wearing out. “Be careful!”

Stan came into view at a run - the idiot. Fortunately, he had sense to launch himself to one side. The room might as well have been stood on one end. Stan landed on the desk Ford was holding on to. The impact caused him to lose his grip. Another surge of terror shot through Ford in the split second before Stan caught his arm.

Completely unwarranted relief welled up in Ford’s chest. He couldn’t help it. He clutched at his brother’s forearm with both hands.

“What did you do?!” Stan demanded, staring past Ford, into the rift.

“Me?!” Despite himself, Ford was offended. “I tried to contain the rifts you created! Clearly I missed one or my calculations were off or-”

“Probably not the time for this!” Pressed sideways against the desk, Stan pulled. He grunted with the effort, hand so tight on Ford’s arm it hurt… Then, suddenly, he wasn’t pulling anymore.

Despite his better judgment, Ford looked down at the rift.

The swirling blacks and blues and stars had formed a tunnel that was growing shorter as the opening in space and time shrank. This particular rift had connected to somewhere specific… and it was nightmarish.

The ground was all slopes and sharp angles, twisted with a kind of M.C. Escher geography. The space around the ground was grainy and dark. The air itself seemed to tessellate. Ford had seen dimensions like this. “Stanley!” Impractically, he hoped his brother still had the means to save him.

Dimensions overlapped, the part of the lab they were in dissolving into theoretical space made fact. For only a moment they were suspended, then Ford hit the ground hard. He went tumbling head over heels and, when he opened his eyes, found himself in the relative darkness of the other dimension - in a hallway without a ceiling. The floor went up at an angle that was steeper the farther it went, branching off into other hallways, becoming a labyrinth that took up his entire field of vision. Shapes stirred within it. Countless eyes peered down at him.

Ford turned away. In the other direction he could see what was left of the lab. The divide between this dimension and that was a crater of grainy rock, cement, and smashed lab parts. Squirming filaments connected the worlds and the shrinking portal between them. Ford could make out his brother’s silhouette in front of it, glasses and hat gone, on his hands and knees several yards away.

Ford made a move toward him and cringed. His right wrist screamed in agony, and he’d landed on his left leg all wrong. The reality of the situation hit him hard. Memories of his first accidental trip through a portal paralyzed him with a sudden and impractical fear. “Stanley!” he repeated, as his brother moved to stand. He hadn’t seen him. “God, please don’t leave me!”

Stan turned. It seemed to take his eyes a moment to focus and find Ford. When he did, he closed the distance between them in an instant. Sometimes it was hard to reconcile away their fight thirty years ago as an accident. But, of course it had been, Ford reminded himself, putting his arms around his brother’s shoulders to keep steady. Stan wouldn’t leave him behind. There was no question of that.

“Let’s get out of here.” Stan said, like it was that easy. He half dragged Ford back toward the lab.

It was like walking into a storm, leaning against gale force winds. The rubble got harder to walk on. Ford lost his balance, inadvertently pulling Stan down with him. Ford squinted through the swirling debris. The rift was closing. His heart sank. His mind raced, searching desperately for some sort of solution to save them from the inevitable.


	2. Chapter 2

 

The space where the dimensions overlapped looked like stained graph paper and felt like needles on the skin. The filaments formed grids around the gaps, pulling tight. Soon the whole thing would be sewn shut. Good for the universe. Not so good for the twins.

“What are you doing?” Stan demanded, pulling his brother along by the front of his shirt.

“I’m thinking!” Ford shouted over the din of the storm around them. He had mere seconds and Stan was wasting them. There was no way not to waste them. They were going to be trapped here together. He just hadn’t accepted it yet.

At least he wouldn’t be alone.

And, just like that, it was over. His time was up. The rift was too small for either of them to fit through.

Stan let go of his brother’s shirt and continued forward. Ford couldn’t imagine why. “It’s too dangerous that close to the rift and there’s no point!”

Stan didn’t listen to him. He was a few yards away. The rift was about the size of a bowling ball now but the space around it was still just as chaotic.

Ford cursed. He tried to get to his feet but stumbled. “Get back here!” he shouted, reaching out - pointlessly, since Stan was paying him no attention.

Stan reached out too, right through what was left of the rift. It began to close around him.

“Stop that!” Ford forced himself to his feet through the pain. “You’re going to lose that arm if you don’t- You can’t just brute force your way through space and time, Stanley!” Ford was having very vivid visions of being trapped in this place, the rift completely closed, and his twin bleeding to death in his arms.

…Except the portal wasn’t closing. Stan braced one hand against the wreckage of a console and pushed up against rift. The filaments stitching the dimensions closed snapped, stretching the rift to accommodate his shoulder.

“Okay…” said Ford, slowly. “Okay. New plan. New plan, stay there!” Ford hurried forward, forgetting his ankle couldn’t support his weight - until it did. He hesitated, rolling the wrist that had, just a moment ago, been cripplingly painful at the slightest bump. It was fine. He crossed the rest of the distance to the rift at a run. “Stanley, I think reality in this dimension exists much like a mindscape. It might even be a reality on top of our existing one. We’re just in a different layer of-”

“Poindexter…” Stan began through gritted teeth. The rift was trying very hard to close around him, the filaments bobbing in and out of his suit, reaching for one another. The pressure must have been enormous.

“My point is, imagine it doesn’t hurt.”

“It hurts.”

“I know, but-”

“Imagine it doesn’t. Yeah. I heard you.” Stan grimaced and staggered. The rift shrank, marginally.

Ford put an arm around his brother. “It’s fine,” he said, willing that to be true. “Let me help.”

“Wait!” Stan caught Ford’s wrist with his left hand. Before Ford could ask why, he let go and pushed both arms through. He forced a knee in next, pushing it down, getting the whole thing over with as quickly as possible. “Stanford…”

Ford didn’t hesitate. He ducked around Stan, climbing over him and through to the other side. It was like knives on his skin again. Pinpricks of pain hit him in a wave as he passed through the rift. They stabbed him, seemed to be attempting to bisect him. He cleared his mind and focused on the lab beyond.

He climbed out onto the ruined floor of the lab. His arms didn’t want to pull him entirely out, but he managed. Immediately, he turned to help Stan- But his wrist gave out beneath his own weight.

Oh, God.

His ankle ached again. It was difficult to pinpoint the pain past the all over ache of crossing through a closing rift. It was there, though. Just like it had been, briefly, in the other dimension. He hadn’t been wrong in his theorizing - not really. He just hadn’t thought this far ahead. God, why hadn’t he thought this far ahead?

“Hey!” There was a tremor in Stan’s voice as he called out for his brother. Ford didn’t miss the fear in his eyes. He tried not to wear a similar expression when he reached out to him.

“Okay,” he said, taking Stan’s hand into his own. “Let’s do this slow.”

Slow was the only option. Stan got less than a foot before collapsing with an exclamation of pain. The filaments detached, but they did so with pieces of clothes and flesh and blood. There was frayed fabric and a circular indention around Stan’s shoulders and, presumably, his chest - where he had been stationary in the rift the longest.

“Oh, no.” Ford moved beneath Stan, supporting him but afraid to touch him. “No, no, no… This is wrong.” It wasn’t, though. It made sense. Mindscape or not, it was their physical bodies that had been there. Reality was a more solid thing here - less malleable, less forgiving.

“Ford-” Stan’s tone was an imploring one. Ford had stopped pulling, and he couldn’t make it out on his own. The rift was trying to mend itself around him again. The damage it was doing on the other side was negligible. The damage here in the dimensional overlap was life threatening. Beyond that, the damage could be catastrophic after the rift closed. If most of the damage was internal, it would be generous not to call it catastrophic now.

“Ford?” Stan repeated, when his brother did nothing but stare. Even after all that had happened between them, it was clear that he hadn’t entertained the idea that Ford would do something as cold as leave him suffering - not for a moment, until now. Now he looked uncertain.

“I don’t know how to fix this,” Ford admitted. He noticed blood on Stan’s lips and wiped it away with his thumb. “I’m not sure I can…” The truth did neither of them any good, though. Ford needed to make a decision. “I’m so sorry, Stanley.”

Ford didn’t pull, he pushed. Stan grabbed at his arms and at the sleeves of his coat. “Wait!” Stan tried to fight it and pull himself out, but he lacked the strength. “Don’t- Don’t leave me here!”

Ford winced. “I won’t,” he promised. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. When Stan went back through the rift, Ford went with him.

With nothing holding it open, the rift finally closed.


End file.
